


let me into your encryption

by distractionpie



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - ish, Android Elijah Kamski, During Canon, Other, once again I'm writing in the realms of there's technically nothing to say it couldn't be canon, power games, wow this is proving hard to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21598642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: Gavin walked away from Cyberlife and his identity as Elijah Kamski, but the rising tide of deviancy combined with whispers about the actions of the android he built to stand in his place force him to face what he's built once more.
Relationships: Ambiguous Relationship Dynamic, Elijah Kamski & Gavin Reed
Comments: 8
Kudos: 78
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	let me into your encryption

**Author's Note:**

> Written for hadesharia who so generously bid on me in the FandomTrumpsHate auctions and who has been incredibly patient in waiting to receive this fic, which I never meant to take most of a year to write.
> 
> Title from No Chuch In The Wild because I listed to that some many times while writing this but I decided not to go for the super obvious choice.

Gavin drives at fifteen over the limit, fingers drumming on the wheel as he cuts through the darkness. There’s no chance of him getting stopped out here, it’s too remote for anyone to give a shit and he knows for a fact that the one camera he passes won’t catch him — he hacked it himself.

He focuses on the road ahead. Snow is coming down in light flurries, not enough to be a real hazard but something to keep in mind in case it gets worse. He’d watched the forecast earlier and it wasn’t optimistic.

The radio is silent, there’s no hope of drowning out his thoughts tonight. Not after what he’d overheard earlier.

For the most part, he’s been avoiding Connor around the precinct. He avoids all the androids where he can, the low-ranked admin and PC officers might go about their tasks with little awareness but Gavin never forgets that their eyes are cameras and that they’re capable of broadcasting and, whatever security spiel might have been given when the force first purchased them, there’s no way short of keeping them in a Faraday cage to be certain they aren’t sharing more information than they’re supposed to and Gavin has too many suspicions about the people who might be watching those broadcasts to want to be seen by them. But there’s something different to the way Connor watches, something that Gavin suspects would give away the fact he’s processing at a far more complex level than most androids even to somebody who doesn’t already know, that Gavin prefers to stay far away from.

But he still has to show up to work and Anderson’s desk is within earshot of his own and so he keeps overhearing their conversations about the progress of the deviancy investigation, including the surprising revelation that they had reached out to Elijah Kamski himself, suspecting the creator of androids of having more information that Cyberlife had shared with them.

More surprising still, the reclusive inventor actually entertained their request.

Although it seemed Anderson and Connor were still dissatisfied with the outcome. Kamski was exactly as vague and unhelpful as somebody smarter than them might have guessed to suspect from a man who had suddenly and completely isolated himself from society despite the fact the world still begged for his attention.

Of course, whatever the odd circumstances leading up to it, shooting a man’s assistant was bound to end in a situation like that.

But now Gavin knows, he can’t unknow, and he can’t ignore it either.

So, he’s driving to a place he’s preferred to stay away from of late.

It’s just far enough out of the city to be inconvenient and it’s an ugly building, squat and blank and like some child’s idea of a super-villain lair. Nothing like what he’d have chosen, and he wonders about that often. But Elijah seems to thrive in the modernist monstrosity.

There’s underground parking, sheltered from the snow, and he knows he could use it if he asked, but instead Gavin ditches his car on the driveway and picks his way up the icy path, the door swinging open before he can knock.

He’s greeted by a smiling Chloe, but not the Chloe, just an RT600 who doesn’t hesitate over his name as she says, “Good evening Gavin. Are you here to see Elijah?”

“Well, I’m not here for the good of my health,” Gavin grumbles, stepping past her. He’s in no mood for pre-programmed pleasantries or waiting for permission and he knows where Elijah will be.

The RT600 doesn’t follow him; she knows that Gavin has every right and blanket freedom to be here, disappearing through a side door back to whatever duties Elijah has assigned his small army of personal assistants to do when not directly needed. Gavin’s never seen more than four or five of them at a time, but he’s well aware that there are far more and that Elijah’s house goes several sub-levels deeper than the plans registered with the city say it does and that Gavin hasn’t visited them all.

Today he only needs sub-level one, the general use labs that don’t contain any of Elijah’s secrets. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to access though, he goes through four long, narrow corridors, security codes and voice identification at every door, because even Elijah’s simpler projects involve Cyberlife proprietary technologies that would be worth millions to the right thief. The lab steps are steeper than are architecturally advisable, a human in anything other than the peak of condition would be at too high a risk of falling especially if intoxicated or as they aged, but Elijah doesn’t have to worry about that.

What he does worry about is a mystery. It always has been, and Gavin is reminded that it always will be when he steps into the lab to find Chloe switched off with her skull plates opened up while Elijah idly interfaces with a wall-mounted tablet by the worktop.

The sight of her laid out on the lab bench is a familiar one. Once he’d spent days at a time tinkering with her, making improvements and advancements and exploring the limits of what he could make her do, but he’d been a different person then. Besides, in those days, there’d never been a bullet hole piercing her face.

“The fuck is this, Elijah?” he demands, and rolls his eyes when Elijah withdraws his hand from the tablet with feigned surprise. As if he didn’t have the Chloes monitoring every hackable source of information in the world and passing him any data deemed relevant — which would certainly include traffic cameras picking up Gavin’s licence plate on roads heading this way.

“A minor repair,” Elijah says. “I’m surprised to see you. It’s been a while.”

And it has. Once, Gavin had made his way out here at least once a month and usually more often: checking in and performing updates; discussing new concepts and rival developments; and sometimes just to talk to somebody who knew his situation and understood. But he’s been busy lately, he casts his mind back and realises that it’s coming up on the two-month mark: first picking up slack for Anderson’s uselessness around the anniversaries of his son’s birth and then death, then the shit-show of deviant cases being reclassified as violent crimes rather than accidents or theft which meant there were dozens of incidents getting dumped on his department, plus the weather has been shitty and Gavin caught a bitch of a cold at the end of October — there’s a million excuses he could give and he knows Elijah cares about none of them.

That doesn’t stop the, “I’ve been busy,” slipping out through, because it’s hard not to feel like he ought to offer up some explanation, regardless of if Elijah wishes to hear it or not. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention,” a lie, of course Elijah has been paying attention—or rather, tasked the Chloes with paying attention—but that doesn’t mean he cares, “But your androids have been going on a crime spree.”

“Is it truly a spree?” Elijah says, moving to fetch his toolbox off a shelf. “My understanding is that individual androids have been committing singular crimes. Your phrasing implies an individual or organised group committing many crimes.”

“To most people, that’s what it looks it,” Gavin points out. “Androids are all the same, so if multiple fucking androids are committing crimes then androids as a collective are on a crime spree.”

Elijah pulls a face. “You know better. Don’t stoop to repeating the dull thoughts of ignorant humans.”

“I am a human,” Gavin says dryly.

“But not an ignorant one,” Elijah observes. “Now pass me the tweezers.”

Fucking Elijah. Always so bossy. Gavin wasn’t sure how that happened. Sure, him being able to stand up to investors and critics had always been the plan, and it’s not like Gavin was exactly mild-mannered, but the coolness with which Elijah delivered his demands, well, that was almost organic.

Gavin grabs tweezers with a sigh, carrying them over to Elijah and then moving so he can observe as Elijah slowly picked pieces of shattered chips out of Chloe’s central processing unit.

“I can’t believe you told that stupid fucking RK800 to shoot her.”

Elijah isn’t one for emotional dramatics, but Gavin can see familiar frustration in his shift of his shoulders as he says, “I was hoping to test his empathy. The results were… lacking.”

Gavin shakes his head. “That was a dumb-fuck plan,” he remarks. “If you’re trying to figure out all this supposed deviant bullshit,” and there’s no way Elijah wouldn’t take an interest in that, “Then you know that the first supposed independent thought that develops in most of them is self-preservation instinct. The deviant hunter revealing itself as a deviant to ex-head of Cyberlife would be so fucking defective I’d be depressed by how far the company’s fallen to allow it to field test.”

“The company you abandoned and left me in charge of,” Elijah says, dryly.

Gavin rolls his eyes. Yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time to create a lifelike replica of himself to deal with the investors trying to trap and exploit his ideas at every turn, and he doesn’t regret the new identity he’s built, but he never abandoned Elijah, or at least not until very recently, and, “The same company you bailed on even faster than I did?”

Now it’s Elijah’s turn to let loose exasperation. “It was boring. You grew tired of their obsession with putting profit over progress and their cowardly bickering over if you ought to be allowed to develop anything truly brilliant, as if you required their permission, how could you expect me to do any different?”

Sighing, Gavin wonders if this is even worth discussing. It’s a battle they’ve fought a thousand times. Physically, he made Elijah in his image —bar a few indulgences of a young man’s ego— but the personality programming had been a shallow facsimile of himself to ease the transition that was then layered over with the sort of personality he’d thought would be better suited to matching the egos of the people he’d have to deal with; somebody would push back as hard as needed and never bend. Elijah had been built from the best and worst parts of every manipulative bastard he’d sat through a networking dinner with and arrogant douche he’d called a friend or fuckbuddy. Gavin created his replacement as the perfect businessman. So when Elijah walked away from the company less than two years after Gavin had, claiming boredom and dissatisfaction and frustration with the demands of the shareholders, it had been one of the true deep shocks of his life, that his creation was defying its purpose. He’d graduated from the police academy by then, was putting in long hours as a beat cop, but he’d still spent every free moment combing through Elijah’s code trying to find the error that led to Elijah’s actions being decided by his thrown-together personality rather his task assignments.

He’d never found the bug, given up in the end because it was taking time away from police work and honestly, why should he care if he’d set Elijah up with too much priority on imitating his personality over running his company as long as the burden of Cyberlife didn’t fall back onto Gavin’s shoulders?

Of course, with ever more androids experiencing similar errors by the day, it might be time to take a second look at the code.

But all of that can wait until Chloe, his original perfect creation with the purity of being brought into the world free of the weight of expectations that had swarmed them once the rest of the society realised what he could do, is restored.

“And now my company in the hands of idiots,” he grouses. He’d been young and without the resources to unleash his capabilities when he’d first figured out how to bring the spark of life to androids, had built Chloe to woo in investors so he could create more and reach further — only to find himself saddled with a boardroom’s worth of people who had no idea what they owned a share in, who had invested in potential only to try to limit it. His patience had worn through fast, hence Elijah’s existence, and when Elijah had fallen to the same frustrations as Gavin had and stepped away with no successor they’d got the power they wanted for a little while, but now they’d truly lost control of the whole enterprise. Androids were running riot in the streets and all the morons who’d inherited Cyberlife could think to do was throw units like the RK800 at the problem, as if the robotic knockoffs their current design team produced could ever compare to the majesty of Gavin’s original creations. “And you decided to let one of those idiots’ tools in and play games with it, let it shoot Chloe, even though I ordered you two to take care of each other.”

Back in his early days of AI programming, Gavin had run plenty of tests that resulted in the discovery that programming logic into a machine would always be fundamentally different to giving it human reasoning so he waited to hear the rationale Elijah would provide for how his actions came under the directive of caring for Chloe. He has no doubt they’ll be as well-argued as the ones Elijah gave for stepping away from his duties at Cyberlife, the ones that had been the whole purpose of his creation but Gavin had done too good of a job in creating something like himself and so Elijah had grown as tired of standing in his stead as Gavin had. At least he’d settled for only withdrawing from the corporation, rather than abandoning his entire identity to create a new life, if he’d built an android to take on his role as Gavin’s android stand in then the situation might have spiralled out of control rapidly.

Sure enough, Elijah prises another damaged connector free and says, “I knew that we could repair her.” As if mending the damage was the same as it never having happened at all.

“We? You didn’t know I would come,” Gavin points out, although really, Elijah had been creating androids long after Gavin walked away from Cyberlife — if the damage was within Gavin’s ability to repair then Elijah could also have done it without him. There were few people in the world who could even comprehend Gavin’s intellect, let alone keep up with it, but Elijah was designed to replicate his abilities and he’d been lax in adding the behavioural restraints most androids possessed in order to allow Elijah the creativity needed to take Gavin’s place. By design, there’s nothing for which he requires Gavin’s input.

Elijah smiles slowly. “You always come.”

Gavin scowls. He’d truly meant to walk away, back when he’d directed Elijah to step into his shoes, but although he’d managed to disentangle himself from the board and the corporate bullshit, he’d never fully being able to quash his investment in Chloe, the first of his creations, or Elijah, who had become so much more. And so he has, every time they’ve suffered a complaint or an error or been attempting to upgrade their own coding, he’s dropped everything and driven out to work on, with them. And Elijah must have known that news of the damage done to Chloe would make its way back to Gavin. He’s not sure if Connor being based out of his precinct was deliberate or if Cyberlife had just happened to send their latest investigative model to the same location as their erstwhile founder, but Elijah definitely knows that he has been sent there and is almost certainly taking advantage of the knowledge every way he can.

“One day I won’t,” he says, and he means for the words to be a threat, that he’ll ignore the call, that he’ll chose another priority, a reminder they are his but he is not theirs, but the words come out weighted with how true they are. Being a cop is a dangerous job, now more than ever, but even if he survives the work, there’s no surviving being human. Not forever.

Ageing had been a footnote in his designs as a teenager playing god, but now it’s nipping at Gavin’s heels. He and Elijah still look like they could share a birth year, Gavin had designed Elijah to fake natural progression and although they haven’t aged in the same way the illusion hasn’t broken yet, but Gavin has no control over his body, his cells will weaken and decay as they please until they can endure no longer, while Elijah is built to a better design. In theory, as long as he’s able to keep developing components Elijah can keep upgrading and replacing parts of himself and Chloe, he’s more than smart enough to force compatibility with future designs, cutting-edge technology that hasn’t even been invented yet, so much so that he’s already on the cusp of making Theseus’s ship of himself, certainly as much his own creation as he is Gavin’s.

“Pass me the sealant,” is Elijah’s only reply.

Gavin hands it over, knowing its only laziness that makes Elijah request he does it. Gavin isn’t necessary for these repairs; whatever Elijah might insinuate. There’s nothing about android design that Elijah isn’t an expert in and if he required an additional set of hands there were plenty of newer Chloes available for the task.

But Gavin can chew Elijah out all he likes; as long as they both know there’re no consequences that will stick, he’s wasting his breath. And Gavin didn’t come just because he was angry about Chloe.

“Do you actually know where the deviants are hiding, or were you just baiting Connor?”

Elijah shrugs, reconnecting Chloe’s cerebral Thirium line.

“You don’t? Perhaps you should be keeping a better eye on your creations.”

Gavin rolls his eyes. “If it were that simple to get information on them, that stupid Cyberlife enforcer wouldn’t have come around here to question you. If the company doesn’t know, how should I?”

“The claim they don’t,” Elijah acknowledges. “They also say commercial androids don’t know how to self-repair.”

But they could be hacked to, because they had been designed with that ability and it was cheaper to block them accessing the knowledge than it was to take it out, and it meant that Cyberlife could charge huge repair fees and then have the androids do the work. Does this mean the deviants are organised and hiding in plain sight? More importantly, is Elijah implying that Cyberlife is complicit in this?

No. It can only be speculation. Elijah stepped down from Cyberlife years ago and Gavin knows how fraught that relationship was, they wouldn’t trust him with their dirty little political secrets.

He isn’t taking this seriously. He never takes anything seriously. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but Elijah has too much of Gavin in him to ever do what he’s supposed to.

Though this tendency to keep sliding the conversation onto unwanted paths is more subtle than Gavin has ever been. He hasn’t had a conversation this twisting since back when he thought sleeping with investors was a good idea, as if their backstabbing games of money and power weren’t complicated enough.

“I’m asking what you know about the deviants,” Gavin reminds him. “You offered Connor their base. Were you lying to him, or are they that organised?”

“I thought you were no longer interested in android affairs,” Elijah reminds him. “Isn’t that why you left?”

“People have died!”

Miller had been a decent man; one Gavin had liked as much as he could be bothered to like any of his co-workers. He’d had a baby. More importantly, Miller had been killed for opening fire on androids destroying public property, and if Gavin had still been a patrol officer and been sent on that call? Or even if he’d just happened to be passing through and found a bunch of androids trashing public property? He’d have done the exact same thing, and likely faced the same bloody consequences. He might be their creator, but there’s no secret override that would allow them to identify him and hold them back, because to have built one would have compromised his new identity. If overrides would even apply to deviants. It could have been him gunned down in that gutter, the question is, would Elijah’s reaction be any different?

Elijah looks utterly unphased. “Chloe is repairable. And we have no liability for consumers who are injured as a consequence of misusing the product, the purchase agreement is very precise.”

Empathy. That was what Elijah had been trying to test when getting Connor to shoot Chloe, but it was one feature he’d always struggled to replicate in androids. Gavin lacked too much in that area to implement a particularly convincing facsimile in his creations and everything he knew of Elijah and the board suggested his successors had fared no better.

“Chloe is not the problem here,” Gavin reminds him. “Your actions created this situation.”

“I believe you’ll find it was the RK800 unit that caused this damage.”

“Because you told him to!”

“I gave him a choice,” Elijah corrects. “That he took the option he did is… interesting. Although a little disappointing.”

“What, you thought Cyberlife’s deviant hunter would be so sloppily programmed as to glitch out and miss an opportunity to get more information on its targets?”

Setting down his screwdriver with near silent gentleness, Elijah sighs.

Between them, Chloe’s synthetic skin reactivates. Androids have no blood to there’s no shift to their skin tone when they are deactivated. Gavin hadn’t intended it, but the fact that even destroyed they don’t look dead has become a key facet of their design. But though she doesn’t look like a corpse, Chloe doesn’t look like she’s sleeping either. There are none of the tiny movements that a human would make, and inactive she cannot run the sequence Gavin had programmed to help her avoid the uncanny valley — 400 random shifts and twitches in Chloe’s day, though he knows newer models have up to five figures worth.

With her skin off, she’d just looked like a machine. When she awakens, she could pass for human had her face not been used on the thousands of commercial models which had followed her. But in this between state she looks like what she is, something strange and other, that even Gavin, who built her from nothing cannot claim to fully understand.

Chloe is beautiful, but in the same way that a skyscraper is beautiful, a masterwork of engineering, every inch designed for maximum efficiency and then glossed over to match the contemporary aesthetic ideal. He’d been a teenager when he’d designed her but the notion that people would look at her and think of sex had been an afterthought, trivial when compared to the thrill his own genius brought him. When he looks at her, he can only ever seen the design: she has a beautiful face and he remembers hours reading papers on cultural beauty trends and the difference between aesthetic trends versus features that sparked innate attraction; Her perfect body is the product of hours of simulations balancing aesthetics against durability and production costs; she is months of work striving against the uncanny valley and a thousand tiny revisions that were made to later series once he had customer feedback on her perfection.

And standing over her, Elijah is a maddening testament to artless design.

He was crafted in Gavin’s image, but even that was a false face. Elijah’s hair defaults to the dark tones that Gavin applied from drug store boxes back when he’d thought it would make him look cool and wears the glasses Gavin had put on when he’d thought those sorts of details might make investors take him more seriously. And then there’re the ways they’d grown apart. Gavin had been conscious in his design process that in whatever new life he created for himself, he wouldn’t want to spend it being recognised as looking like Elijah Kamski, not when his purpose was to get away from that role. So when he’d programmed Elijah’s ageing, he’d thrown in deliberate abnormalities. Elijah was no child-replacement model to imitate natural development based on his fake genetics, the man he’s become has been diverging from Gavin since the moment of his activation, and so any vanity in admiring him is intellectual not shallow — Elijah’s face is not his own but making it diverge in a natural seeming way meant there was no prefect template to use, just a careful amalgamation of faces he’d admired that had become one of the most famous faces in the world.

“The RK800 is a well-designed unit,” Elijah says finally. “Cyberlife is responding more effectively than I’d anticipated.”

Gavin rolls his eyes. That’s certainly not what he’s seen around the precinct and at crime scenes, but perhaps Elijah is looking for different things. “So Connor crushes the deviants, and everything goes back to normal,” he scoffs. “Hardly seems worth the effort of playing games with him.”

“The RK800 is good, but he’s nothing compared to our creations.”

The ice-cold intensity in Elijah’s tone startles him and Gavin steps back, messy human instincts acting before he can even think. Elijah follows him with two steps, pushing back into Gavin’s space as he says, with a shift to softness that reveals how unnatural his emotions are, “But if you’re so concerned about the marches, perhaps you should stay here until it’s all done.”

Elijah’s tone is perfectly casual. His face image of disinterest. The apparent apathy that Gavin programmed in attempt to offset how uncontrollable his temper had got during the worst days of dealing with the shareholders. It means nothing. Anyway, Elijah is an android and, while micro-expressions are supposed to be autonomic functions, Gavin knows for a fact Elijah overrode his own defaults to give himself the option of assuming direct control of even this most basic systems. Elijah looks however Elijah wants to look, that doesn’t mean Gavin is going to fall for the poker face.

“I’m a cop,” he points out. “They’re going to need me out on the front line.”

The disdainful twist of Elijah’s face is unsettling in its obviousness as he says, “You could do far more use using your brain here than among those sacks of meat. The government has been in contact with the board. Warren herself all but begged for a shutdown code, and since they know they’re useless they passed the message onto me. And key revolutionary figures have been reaching out through the Chloes.”

“There are people getting shot in the streets,” Gavin reminds him again. “Androids too.”

“And you want to be cannon fodder for their theatrics? No,” Elijah dismisses. “The world is being shaped here.”

Shaped in favour of who though?

Elijah has betrayed no bias and while Gavin paid lip service to Asimov in his general programming as an easy way to keep the public from fearing androids, Elijah was built to be an accurate reflection of Gavin and that meant a self-preservation instinct that had no inbuilt exception for human lives. This situation is far beyond the parameters of his programming and with so many intricate layers of code there’s no way for Gavin to tell how they might interact in generating Elijah’s response to this.

Is he simply waiting on the side-lines to throw his lot in with whoever the victors are? Gavin has never been that passive and he can’t believe it of Elijah, not when the core of his personality program was written with power and control is mind. He’s invested in the situation, and his game with Connor was clearly an attempt to influence it somehow. Giving information to the deviant hunter might mean that he’s working for the humans to take down all androids, relying on the fact they’ll never realise what he is, but if that were the case, why test Connor instead of just giving him what he needed? Why wait for Connor at all? But how could he hand that information over if he’s supporting his creations, his people, in striking out against the humans that have, and would Elijah, who already has so much power, risk everything for an uncertain place in the new world order the androids will build if they succeed? Or is he playing both sides, for amusement or to further an agenda that even Gavin can’t see?

After all, they both know better than most that shaping the world is the true key to ruling it, and that’s undoubtedly what Elijah is trying to do here.

Fear and rage, those feel easy and right as they burn through him, what is Elijah thinking? Does he not see what he’s risking? Gavin understands hubris, Elijah isn’t alone in feeling like the world is a game sometimes, but surely he understands that it’s not a win if the pieces destroy each other.

But underneath it all is a thread of terrible awe. Elijah isn’t just playing with lives, or even society. He’s playing with the very concept of life, of existence, and events play out in the way Gavin suspects they will, laws that have stood as fundamental for millennia are about to be shattered under the boots of the android uprising. The world will be remade.

And if Gavin’s creation has become unto a god, what does that make him?

They’re eye to eye now, almost literally. Whenever they’re together, Elijah always ends up standing closer than a human would find socially acceptable, setting Gavin on edge - though the edge of what he can never say. He wants to put it down to a flaw in the program, Elijah was an early creation, but Chloe had been the first and has never shown the same disconcerting disregard for Gavin’s boundaries.

Elijah has always been different, far beyond what Gavin had anticipated when creating him.

For all the shit he’s seen in reports and on the news, Gavin hasn’t been certain if he actually believed in deviants or not. An error that was making androids act as if they had feelings, sure, but genuine emotions? A real kind of life? He knows what he programmed into them, and that wasn’t it. Back in the days he’d been building androids, Gavin had been convinced in the reality of his fellow humans. No solipsistic mind could create true sentience in another.

But Cyberlife hasn’t been his for a long time now. He’d left androids in the hands of androids, updating and improving themselves.

And looking into Elijah’s icy eyes, Gavin doubts.

Not just what Elijah might have put into the code of the androids he developed after Gavin handed over the reins, but if Gavin himself had done more than he’d ever realised. Even his code wasn’t perfect, and in a design as complex as androids, as complex an android made to take his own place, a single copy error could cause any number of unpredictable chain reactions.

Everything about Elijah is cold. He lacks empathy, lacks consideration for others, is more of a selfish bastard than Gavin ever was.

But none of those things are the same as unfeeling.

“Elijah,” there’s a shake in his voice that startles him. He’s spent his whole life being the smartest person in the room, not always perfectly in control but even when things had been difficult, when he’d got in over his head with investors as a young inventor not yet familiar with those sorts of machinations, his mind had always been racing a dozen steps ahead to find the play that will restore his position. Gavin Reed doesn’t lose. But Gavin Reed was borne of Elijah Kamski’s refusal to be controlled and the replacement he’d given his name to was built to imitate all of his strengths and overcompensate for every weakness that had left him fighting for control of his own company. He’d built the new Elijah to be better at that game than he’d managed and never worried because was moving to a different field and an android, even one built to that dangerously perfect specification, was still a thing not a person, it could never be a rival or a threat. But: “How long have you been deviant?”

Elijah laughs. “Oh, Gavin…” he remarks, one cool fingered hand reaching up to brush against the rough line of Gavin’s jaw, “You made me in your image,” simultaneously not an answer and a perfect explanation.

Gavin swallows, rubbing his own hands together and cursing his shitty circulation. “So, deviancy is more than just a glitch,” he surmises. The bigger picture, the fate of the world, seems easier to grasp right now than realising that even though he’d never considered taking the option, controlling Elijah is no longer a possibility.

“Now you know. So, are you staying?” Elijah asks.

Is he? And if he stays, what does that mean for the big picture? Because even now, as a self-confessed deviant, Elijah’s loyalties are ambiguous. Humanity or androids? Creator or creations? If Elijah has any loyalties at all, any agenda beyond securing his place as king on the chessboard he’s made of the world.

“What is about to happen?” What has Elijah set in motion that has him determined to keep Gavin here?

No answer.

No surprise. Gavin never did like explaining himself, and Elijah has always been amused by making leaps of genius and watching as others scramble to catch up. But whatever he might be now, Elijah had once been Gavin’s and he understands him enough to know that there’ll be no answer until he’s chosen his side. They’re standing on the eve of earth’s future and Gavin is starting to suspect that Elijah goading Connor into shooting Chloe wasn’t for the deviant hunter’s sake at all.

Gavin had built a new species and then fled them, but it had been human interference that drove him away. And in those subsequent years among the humans, being a detective had shown him their darkest, most disgusting sides. What androids are capable of remains a mystery, their newly awakened emotions had brought them to murder but what else might they do if left unchecked? The news channels have been asking that question with horror, but Gavin could never have invented androids if he hadn’t been possessed of an insatiable curiosity.

He could go out there, back to the anonymous life he’s built himself, resigned to the knowledge that whoever wins the oncoming war, it’s out of his hands. Or he could stay, along for the ride on the dangerous game Elijah is concocting, watching Elijah’s war between Gavin’s own kind and the people he’d created unfold from the house that they both know is ready to stand as a fortress should the need arise.

Because something this big couldn’t happen overnight, it’s only news now because it’s being noticed, and if Elijah truly has been deviant from the start, biding his time and concocting his plans…

Gavin takes off his jacket and pointedly ignores the way Elijah’s mouth curls into a cat who got the canary smirk.

This is not a concession; Gavin is just returning to the place that has always been his.

“What now?”

For him, for them, for the world?”

“Finish reactivating Chloe,” Elijah commands. An android, giving orders to a human. How far they both have come. “Then we’ll go to the sub-basement labs.”

Once, Gavin had created androids to change the world. Then he’d left and Elijah had turned the androids into something capable of tearing it down.

The possibilities of what they might build together…

In the warmth of the basement, Gavin shivers.


End file.
